The Memorial To The Murdered Jews Of Europe, also known as the Holocaust Memorial, in Berlin (Picture: Reuters)

The horror of the death toll of Hitler’s ‘final solution’ does not diminish with time.

Between the years 1939 and 1945 the Holocaust claimed millions of lives, with most taken in death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the day some 7,000 prisoners were liberated from Auschwitz.

It is estimated that 11 million people died in the Holocaust.

About 1.1million of those were children.

6 million of all the people killed were Jewish and the remaining 5 million were made up of Poles, gypsies, homosexuals, mentally and physically disabled people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Russians, priests and pastors, resistors and non-Jewish spouses who refused to divorce.

Of the 6 million Jewish people, 3 million were Polish.

It is estimated that the ‘pre-Final Solution’ Jewish population in Poland was 3,300,000 and that the amount of Polish Jews killed was 3,000,000, a total of 90 per cent.

Advertisement

Advertisement

In Europe and Russia the pre-Holocaust Jewish population is estimated to be 8,861,800 and after the war it was estimated at 5,933,900, meaning that a total of 67 per cent of the overall Jewish population died during that six year period.

Of the 5 million non-Jewish victims, over 3 million were estimated to be Russian civilians and prisoners of war, over 200,000 were gypsies, over 70,000 were mentally or physically disabled, over 2,500 were Jehovah’s Witnesses and there is an unknown amount of homosexuals, priests, deportees, political prisoners (though it is estimated to be within the tens of thousands).

The Nazis imprisoned their victims in a mixture of concentration camps that ranged from labour camps where they forced prisoners into hard labour (usually supporting the Nazi war efforts), to extermination camps where they murdered Jews and anyone else that they decided didn’t fit into their world view.

The largest extermination camp was Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland and was established in 1942.

The SS gassed as many as 6,000 Jews a day. It is estimated that over 1,000,000 people lost their lives within its walls.

The death toll for extermination camp Treblinka was 870,000, for Belzec, 435,000, for Sobibor, 200,000, for Chelmno, 150,000 and for Majdanek, 78,000. All of these death camps were based in Poland.

Lives weren’t just lost in extermination camps though, labour camps also had a high death toll.

For instance, Buchenwald, the largest concentration camp in Germany held 250,000 prisoners and there were 56,000 deaths.